How to size a heat pump

Stuart Duff, the editor of Professional Heating & Plumbing Installer looks at an easy way to size a heat pump.

In October, the Government published its Clean Growth Strategy to set out how the Government intends to meet the Fifth Carbon Budget (2028-32) which was passed into law last year.

The Strategy lists a raft of proposals to improve the energy efficiency of homes and commercial buildings, and encourage the adoption of low carbon heating.

PHPI has focused before on the need for our industry to transition to renewable, low carbon heating and the opportunity this offers for the early adopters, but if you don’t know much about heat pumps, where do you start?

A few simple steps

An online tool from Mitsubishi Electric offers an easy guide to getting the right heat pump for any property.

The Ecodan selection tool can be found on the website http://ecodan.co.uk, and once you get past the scary looking T’s & C’s (which essentially say that the tool provides an illustration only) you are presented with a simple to use app, which will suggest which sized heat pump would apply best for a particular type of property.

It will also calculate the likely payments the customer could receive from the Renewable Heat Incentive AND it will show you and them the likely running costs (and savings) against gas, oil, LPG and direct electric, as well as the savings in carbon emissions for those customers that want to know how ‘green’ they are being.

Run costs

RHI payments

You can easily choose property types and ages; specify the number of bedrooms and the geographical location, or even use the tool for commercial properties from hotels, offices, schools and apartment blocks.

For most customers though, the single dwelling option is a simple way of giving them a quick illustration of how much they could save on their running costs – and how much they could receive in RHI payments for seven years.

So, you might not have considered offering a heat pump to your customers yet, but the least you can do is spend a couple of minutes playing with the selection tool so that when a customer next asks you about alternative forms of heating, you’ve got a quick answer – and a quick solution for taking them through the options.